Monday, June 19, 2006
I´ve arrived
hi everyone, i´m finally actually here in xela. this keyboard is kind of weird, so don´t get mad when my apostrophes are actually accents, i can´t find a button that makes an apostophe on this computer. there´s a button for it, but none of the buttons do what they say they´ll do.so anyhow. yesterday morning i woke up at 4 in order to leave the house by 5 to get to SFO on time for my 9:55 flight (i made that colon using the period and greater than key. and i can´t find a slash either. oh well. so at any rate, i had plenty of time at the airport and arrived in dallas at about 2:50 texas time. i hung out in the dallas airport for awhile, and then took a flight at 5:17 for Guatemala City, which arrived at 8:30 Guatemala time. how long were the flights, you ask (can´t find the question mark! argh!) the answer is i have no idea. but i got here safe and sound, and that´s the important part. i was really nervous on the second flight and was having some little mini panic attacks, where my heart would beat all fast and i´d get all sweaty, because i was super nervous about being in some foreign country by myself and wasn´t sure that it was such a good idea after all, but i´ve sort of gotten over it. i still wish i´d found someone to come with me, but i´m surviving.
on the second flight, i was sitting next to a man who was going to meet up with his wife in guatemala, and we got to talking and i found out that he was in the peace corps in colombia after college, met his wife there, and stayed for 18 years. he was a really interesting man, and we stood in line for customs together and waited for our checked bags together, which was nice. sometimes i like to do things on my own and be independent, but in this case i was really happy to have an experienced male traveler sort of looking out for me. aside from that, the flying was uneventful.
after i finally got my checked bag (i think it must have been the last one off the plane), i went to meet gilda, who has a bed and breakfast kind of thing outside of guatemala city. the car ride was sort of awkward, because i´d just met gilda and didn´t really have anything i wanted to talk about and was mostly just tired, but it would be weird not to talk... so at any rate, it was just sort of odd all the way around. we got to her house and she showed me my room and then told me she´d have breakfast ready at 5:45 the next morning, since we had to go to the airport to pick up someone else at 6:15. i took a quick shower and climbed in bed. i´m not sure if i really slept at all, but the moral of the story is that i was awake most of the night at least. i had synched my alarm clock with the clock that was in the room, and it went off at what i thought was 5:15, plenty of time to brush my teeth and get dressed by breakfast time. however, it turns out that the clock in the room was about 10 minutes slow, so i was sort of rushed and didn´t really finish my breakfast. oh well, i didn´t know, and we couldn´t be late to pick up rachel. once we found her at the airport, gilda drove us to the bus station, helped us buy tickets, and went on her merry way.
rachel, who we picked up, seems nice, and it was good to have someone to talk to and sit with on the bus. she´s from san francisco, is 30 years old, and is an art teacher. the bus ride was pretty uneventful, we went through some pretty countryside and it was a first class bus, not a chicken bus, which means that it was not too crowded and the seats were pretty comfortable. partway through, my eyes got really heavy, so i thought i´d rest them for a little while, and i think i fell asleep, because when the bus driver honked really loud and my eyes opened again, i felt more rested. those of you who have been on long bus or car trips with me know that, much to my chagrin, i can´t sleep sitting up, so i was very surprised that i was able to, which just goes to show how tired i actually am.
the bus ride, which was supposed to be four hours, turned out to be more like 5, and therefore the person from ica who should´ve picked us up wasn´t there when we arrived in xela. luckily, there was a woman from another language school picking up someone else who called ica for us and drove us to the school in her pickup. i was a little nervous about that, but she seemed reputable, and she did get us there. had she been a man, i would not have gone in her truck, but i trust that women aren´t out to rape and rob me. maybe that´s a silly thing to think, but anyway, i felt safe and it was the middle of the day, so it was fine.
once i arrived at the school, i was instructed to go with kristin, another student, because i´d be staying in the same house as her. the house is about 3 blocks away from the language school, which is nice, and it´s clean and spacious, which is extra nice. no one was home when we arrived, but kristin showed me around a little, and then dulce showed up. krisitin just got here on wednesday, but she said that as far as she can tell, dulce is the one who cooks for us and looks after us, and she looks to be about my age. her parents live in the house too, but kristin said they work a lot, and she just met the dad yesterday. it´s not really the family situation i was hoping for, but i figured out that why i was put there was because i told them that i didn´t eat red meat, and this is the vegetarian house. i was planning on being vegetarian here anyhow, since i´m suspecting that the chicken i´d be served wouldn´t be organic and free range, and maybe wouldn´t even be refrigerated, so this is fine, but it will be different from living with a younger family, certainly. we had a tasty lunch of some sort of veggie soup and corn on the cob and tiny tortillas, and then kristin and i went to xela pages, a nearby internet cafe, so that i could call my mom and let her know i got here.
after that, i had been instructed to return to ica at 3 to meet with martin about my volunteer assignment. the interesting thing about ica, or maybe it´s guatemala in general, is that things aren´t terribly structured. i´m glad that meghan warned me about that beforehand, or else i´d be having a minor heart attack right about now. luckily, there´s another woman who´s taking classes at ica and volunteering at the girl´s school, so i talked to her and we´re going to meet at ica tomorrow morning at 8:45 and walk over together. aside from that, there are no plans. i´m supposed to introduce myself to the teachers and see who wants my help - there´s no assignment, no introduction by the school principal, i´m just supposed to try and make myself useful. we´ll see how that goes. luckily, i can use the free internet at ica, and can go on their outings on the weekend, so i´ll hopefully make friends and have a good time, one way or another.
i don´t know what i was expecting, coming to guatemala, but it´s definitely different from the u.s. for one, the light switches are horizontal, not vertical, as are some of the the stoplights (green is on the right). there are people walking around wearing traditional mayan garb with baskets on their head, like you see in pictures of guatemala. i don´t know why i wasn´t expecting to see that, but it surprised me. it´s kind of like seeing a celebrity, where you weren´t really sure that they´re actual people until you see them in real life. drivers are insane here, and i never ever want to drive myself anywhere in this country, i would for sure crash because i´d had a nervous breakdown and passed out at the wheel. luckily, i don´t forsee myself having to drive anywhere.
there are things that are the same as the u.s., of course. there are fast food chains (i´ve seen mcdonalds, a lot of burger kings, and a pizza hut so far), and we even passed a hooters on the bus, which i thought was hilarious. there was an aikido dojo and something called ¨gym scandinavia¨, which had a giant poster out from with very aryan looking people working out, which i thought was a little odd, considering that basically the only aryan people here are just visiting and wouldn´t buy a gym membership, probably. i suppose it´s because america is all powerful and everything, so maybe guatemalans figure that if they work out at a place with white people on the front, that will somehow make them whiter, i don´t know. anyhow, i thought it was weird.
there were also a lot of cows tethered by the road, which is not something i´ve ever seen before in my life, although there were not as many mangy looking dogs as i´d anticipated seening. there was also something called the autohotel kama sutra, which i think is interesting, and a ways down the road there was another autohotel, i´ll have to find out what that is.
my spanish is coming back to me, which is good. i´m going to try to put pictures on here, but i can´t find a usb hookup on this computer, so i´m going to try going back to xela pages and hope that their computers are newer.
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mmm im 66 blond blue eyes and very guatemalan so is my entire family and most of my friends... and we are all guatemalan and our parents arent from "powerful" america guatemalans just like americans were colonized by europeans. so dont feed ingnorace to the world... and you will never see cows runing around in the largest city in central america...